This picture's apparently good for scaring mice...

[Kent Nassen, c1974 65K JPEG] yk

Kent Nassen c.1974

Okay, it has been suggested that I put in a little about myself beyond what you can discern from the sort of web pages I put up. As the picture above shows (assuming you can see it), I play bass guitar (that's a 1973 >Carvin SB60 above) and have since 1972. My newest guitar is a Rickenbacker 4003. Definitely, it lives up to its reputation...and no, I'm not interested in selling it! ;).

My favorite amp is my black padded vinyl-covered Kustom B200 (100W RMS), which is of course, much too loud for the neighbors, but not loud enough for large gigs. It's semi-retired right now. My current (and relatively long-standing) musical interests are rockabilly, electric guitar blues, and 60's, 70's and 80's rock, though nothing at all disco-ish or rap-ish. I'm not playing with any band currently, but I do play frequently for my own enjoyment.

In April of 1999, I accepted employment with the Parke-Davis Division of Warner-Lambert Corporation in Ann Arbor as a programmer/analyst in the Clinical Reporting Systems department. I was very happy with this move, related as it was to the duties of my previous job, but in a larger department, with many new things to learn, and more opportunities for career growth. My main duties were the programming, with SAS, of summary research tables and reports for the company's clinical research trials. In May 2000, I was promoted to Senior Systems Analyst. In October 2000, I was moved to Lead Programmer on one of the drug programs in our department. In March of 2001 I was moved to Lead Programmer of half the department's programs. In 2003 I became a project leader. Of course, after the "merger" with Warner-Lambert, I then worked for Pfizer, Inc. and the Ann Arbor location was then called Pfizer Global Research and Development -- Ann Arbor Laboratories. As of November 8, 2007 I was laid off from Pfizer due to the site closing in Ann Arbor. At the time I left, I was an Associate Director, leading teams of SAS programmers located in places like Shanghai and Mumbai. My actual last day of employment will be January 7, 2008, due to the 60 day WARN period. Starting January 14, 2008, I've been working for United Biosource Corporation in their Ann Arbor, MI office as the manager of the clinical programming department there.

My previous job was at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, MI, where I was a Senior Data Archive Specialist. There I spent a lot of my time on a Sun Unix server writing Bourne shell, AWK, and Perl scripts, SPSS and SAS programs, as well as the occasional C program. My main jobs there were cleaning and documenting survey data collections, and setting up systems to help with that process. While at ICPSR, I presented brown-bag seminars to my co-workers on the use of sed & AWK and about avoiding, diagnosing, and correcting SAS & SPSS programming errors.

At home, I run the free unix operating system FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE on my old Pentium (s-l-o-w! But faster than Windows on the same machine), and FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE in a Parallels virtual machine on my AMD64 system, and 6.3-STABLE on a Dell dual-core AMD-64 system.

I use some version of the vi editor every day (lately it's been almost entirely vim, although elvis, vile, nvi, xvi, and vanilla vi see the occasional use). I actually use or have tried all of the vi clones or work-alikes I discuss and show on my vi page and I usually edit my HTML code by hand using vi or vim, hence the vi-powered logo on my vi page. In May of 2006, I joined the xvi SourceForge project as a developer.

I'm published in at least one textbook on management and in several journals and proceedings. My undergraduate degree was in journalism and industrial management (double major) and a few years after that I earned my MBA. I'm ABD on a Ph.D. (Candidate in Philospophy) in marketing, which provided me with a lot of methods classes and marketing/psychology theory. I enjoy studying statistics and statistical computing, as a result, which shouldn't seem strange given all the stat and methodology courses I've had to take at the graduate level.

In 1999, my last academic article "Representation of Measurement Error in Marketing Variables: Review of Approaches and Extension to Three-Facet Designs," a collaboration with Richard P. Bagozzi and Youjae Yi, was published in the Journal of Econometrics Special Issue on Marketing (89) link. My programming job has also lead to quite a few internal research report publications and a few SAS user group articles.

In past eras of my life, I've earned a ham radio license back in the days when you needed to know Morse code to pass (novice, call KA0QEQ--probably long since expired/retired), accumulated over 80 hours in single engine aircraft including three solo X-countries, water skied all of several summers, golfed, and spent my autumns and winters hunting squirrels, pheasants, ducks, and geese. I've also enjoyed fishing year 'round for many years (I've only recently had the opportunity for that here in Michigan). In previous employment, I've operated Heidelberg K-line offset (KORD) and letter presses, done darkroom work, bindery work, been a bookkeeper, and a general manager for a commercial printing plant.

On the Grex public-access computer conferencing system, I'm the FIGlet font maintainer and the "fairwitness" of the Life 101/Consumer on-line conference. That tends to be the catch-all conference for anything to do with purchasing and using products, as well as finding sources for goods & services (not extremely active). On the M-Net public-access computer conferencing system, I'm one of the fairwitnesses of the Unix conference, where just about any Unix-related topic can be discussed.

[Kent Nassen, 2006, 151K JPEG] 2006

Currently, my wife, Suzi, and I, and two cats, Purrl and Scooter share a wonderful new (to us) house in a small rural subdivision near where I work. Our other cat, the long-haired calico Cricket, died in April of 1999 at the age of 17. (George the cat finally died at the age of 21 in early 2004. At the end of 2004, we adopted a kitten (Purrl) from the area Humane Society, and she's now big and rambunctious. Shortly thereafter we took in a Hemingway (polydactyl) cat named Scooter, who is extremely friendly and smart.

My wife worked for the University of Michigan as a network operations consultant in the University-wide network operations center until she was RIF'd (reduction in force=layoff) about two years before she would have earned her pension benefits. My stepson, Jonathan is having fun learning his new job du jour. My stepdaughter, Dorothy, and her husband Chris, have three wonderful, extremely intelligent, children: a girl named Elizabeth and boys named Forrest and Nicholas.

So there you have a bit of the past, a lot of the present and a little of the future for Kent Nassen.

--Kent

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Decode this geek code. (Or see the Code of the Geeks page. or the Geek Code Decoder Page)

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